Issue 3, September 2006

by Geoff Nicholson

You've got to love Mariko Mori. She's a seductress. As we see from her regular appearances in her own art, she's young, winsome, exotic, sometimes highly sexualised and cute enough to have had a limited-edition doll made in her image (by Parkett). She looks like a lot of fun. And her art looks like a lot of fun too. It's bright, shiny, colourful, beautifully made, often using gorgeous state-of-the-art materials. It begs you to look and to touch. It seems thoroughly modern, thoroughly pop. But it also feels thoroughly Japanese, which means that it embraces such diverse cultural manifestations, ancient and modern, as Zen Buddhism, cybertronics, the tea ceremony, manga and some fairly inscrutable eroticism.

If the term 'multimedia artist' still has any currency at all then that's what Mariko Mori is. She embraces performance, photography, video, computer technology, sculpture and much else besides. In some of her art she uses her own body in a very direct way, such as dressing up as a sex worker for a Cindy Shermanesque photo piece called Red Light (1994). Other, more recent pieces simply look like architecture, such as Wave UFO (1999–2003), a giant space blob, the size of a house, that you walk into and put on a headset enabling you to create light patterns with your brainwaves, and connect them to the brainwaves of other exhibition-goers. Mori reckoned this was the sort of thing airports might like to have in their public waiting areas: you can imagine how many airport authorities agreed with her.

Born in 1967 in Tokyo, Mori was a fashion student there and, briefly, a model. She left Japan, aged 21, studied at Chelsea School of Art in London, and then was part of the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in New York. She announced herself to the art world in 1995 with a work called (and you'll have to gauge for yourself the degree of irony involved) Birth of A Star.

Since then her work has been regularly appearing around the world in group exhibitions with titles like Deep Space in Melbourne, and in solo shows such as Esoteric Cosmos in Wolfsburg, Connected World in Paris and Oneness in New York.

Her last London show was at the Serpentine Gallery in 1998, although many will remember her Dream Temple (1997–9) from the Royal Academy's Apocalypse exhibition. That offering was a wonderfully chaste and non-apocalyptic work, a replica (we had to take her word for this) of an actual temple built in Japan in the eighth century. Her modern version was made from dichroic glass that appeared translucent or transparent according to the angle from which you viewed it. And now she's back with what will surely be two very high-profile and very popular appearances in London this autumn.

The first, and in some ways the more conventional (though that's not a word that comes easily to mind when talking about Mariko Mori), is an exhibition at the ALBION Gallery in Battersea called Beginning of the End: Present, Past and Future. This is the latest version of a project she's been working on since 1995, which is also sometimes known as the 'body capsule project'.

The idea is infinitely simple and infinitely ambitious. Mori visits a cultural or spiritual hotspot – say, Angkor Wat, the Pyramids (that's the past), Times Square or Piccadilly Circus (the present), Dubai or La Defense in Paris (the future). Once there she lies in a transparent pod, fl oating in clear liquid, dressed in a primary coloured, skin-tight bodysuit, and documents the event. Notions of birth, death, rebirth, the exploration of inner and outer space and (let's face it) international spiritual jetsetting inevitably come to mind.

An innocent observer might even look at these images and think they didn't exist anywhere except in cyberspace. David LaChapelle could surely create photographs much like these without ever leaving the comfort of his LA studio. But Mori, to her credit, gets out there and does it for real. The reaction of the locals is part of the work and, as she says, this sometimes involves putting herself at a certain amount of personal risk. When she set up the capsule in Tokyo, passers-by kicked it and threw rocks, which seems a long way from the received wisdom about Japan. Aren’t we always told how orderly and law-abiding the Japanese are?

"I thought so too," concedes Mori. "I couldn't really explain why that’s happening. Perhaps because it was early morning, 5am, and people were a little bit drunk. I think if it had been five in the afternoon people would have acted quite differently. Maybe the Japanese aren't so accepting of something that’s different from their regular lives."

In New York people were more encouraging and conscious of the fact that it was a performance: "They were quite cheerful, understanding what’s going on and realising what it is." In London people were very curious: "They wanted to know what was going on and were encouraged to come close to the body capsule." In Paris people didn't pay any attention at all and Mori acknowledges that the location of the pod (in this case in the business district around La Defense) is critical to the reactions it provokes: "Even in Paris it might have been different in different places – you know, if it had been in a famous square or something. There's a significant difference depending on what the culture is."

The Beginning of the End will be presented at the ALBION as an all-embracing environment. At this point the exhibition only exists as a computer model, but that seems entirely appropriate. Eventually there'll be three wraparound panoramic photomontages showing Mori and the capsules in situ, while elsewhere in the gallery space there'll be videos documenting the making of the work.

Being able to create visually eye-popping works that also have a serious spiritual dimension is at the core of Mori's ambition, and it's by no means an easy trick to pull off. For my money there's something a bit amorphous and New-Agey about some of the spirituality. She wasn't, I suggested, during the course of our conversation, interested in any organised form of religion. Her work doesn't, for example, address the notion that religion might be the kind of thing you'd want to go to war for, or die or kill other people for. She agreed, I think.

"I've done research in sites in Japan from 12,000 BC but I've also visited some sites in Scotland which are from around 25,000 BC. It's a rather more primal way of looking at life and death, and certainly it's not to do with the organised tradition of religion; it's more about essential humanity. Perception in the prehistoric era is very fundamental, but it's interesting how they're perceiving nature and creating some kind of relationship within life and death that is very similar to, for example, Zen Buddhism or Egyptian or Aboriginal or Mayan beliefs."

What makes Mori's works even more ambitious is that they marry spiritual aspirations with cutting-edge science and technology. "There's an idea of rebirth and life common to ancient civilisations," she continues, "but at the same time our modern technologies allow us to develop scientific research about the mystery of the universe. The discovery of a primal particle such as a neutrino brings with it a lot of knowledge about the universe."

This, of course, is a terribly attractive idea – that the connectedness created by modern technology has something in common with the kind of oneness expressed in ancient religion. It sounds great, but it's not entirely clear whether the resemblance is anything other than metaphoric. Being able to make a phone call to Mariko Mori in Tokyo, to have an instant connection and to have a beautifully clear line, as though I was calling a neighbour two houses away, has undeniable advantages, but whether this really has anything to do with Buddhist notions of oneness and connectedness is, at the very least, unproven.

Still, the mention of the neutrino brings us to the other work that will be on display in London this year: an 18-foot-high glass sculpture, designed by Isometrix, built in Italy and to be erected outside ALBION, on the south bank of the Thames between the Albert and Battersea bridges. Apparently it owes its existence entirely to the existence and discovery of the neutrino.

"The neutrino," says Mori, "is related to the death of an exhausted star, but it's connected with the beginning of the universe. The Big Bang produced many neutrinos, so the neutrino for me defines a very important part of life and death. I wanted to create an artwork that symbolised the idea that death is the beginning of new life. So, in the case of the sculpture, when some supernova explosion happens in or near our galaxy, the neutrinos it produces illuminate some special lighting within the sculpture."

If I understand my particle physics correctly, neutrinos are chargeless subatomic particles that are bombarding us the whole time, and although their theoretical existence was posited back in the 1930s, it wasn't until the 1980s that science had any way of detecting them.

"This work I'm showing," says Mori, "is a collaboration with a neutrino detection system that won the Nobel Prize for a professor at Tokyo University. When a neutrino is detected, the data is received through the network. We analyse it and then transmit it to the work and create some applications and that change the colour of the LEDs in the glass sculpture."

Whether any of this will be apparent to passing Londoners remains to be seen. I suspect they'll just notice some changing coloured lights and enjoy them as pure spectacle. Perhaps it doesn't even matter if they're aware of the grand technical and philosophical apparatus underpinning the work. And this may apply to the body capsule project too. You may just be amused by the sight of a young woman in a bodysuit in a transparent pod in various cool locations around the world.

Whether the huge amount of effort that evidently goes into making Mariko Mori's art is strictly 'necessary' must remain open for debate. Perhaps other, simpler techniques could have been used, perhaps the means sometimes seem out of proportion to the end result, but the fact remains that this is how she's chosen to do it. Enormous complication and elaboration are clearly part of the process. When it comes to seduction the end always justifies the means.